Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Elegance

As all of you know, I love horses. I grew up raising and training horses, and taking part in different types of competitions. This painting, Elegance, grew out of my love for horses. I like to focus on the beauty, gracefulness of horses, as well as the horsemanship and showmanship skills of their riders and handlers.

While I was judging a horse show last year, my husband kindly took photographs of the horses and people for me. He got some really great shots too! This was one such shot. Now, I have cropped it quite a bit. My husband took the shot from quite a distance, but I wanted to focus on the graceful curves of this horse, the way he was moving, and the lower body position of the rider. I decided on a gold background because I associate gold with elegance and this horse had a decidedly elegant look. I kept the background simple so as not to interfere with the horse and rider. I let the horse's swishing tail add to the composition in the empty part of the painting.

I enjoyed painting this picture very much and I hope you have enjoyed viewing it and reading about its creation.

2 comments:

Well you've certainly achieved your goal here. My first thoughts on seeing this were 'simplicity' and 'elegance'.

I guess like the discipline of dressage itself the aim of painting/drawing should be that the viewer sees only the polished end result without knowing of the hours of hard slog that go into producing it :o)